The Way We Learned to Love ✓

44 - lily

january 2020 : 8 months ago

Lily couldn't remember a time when there had ever been this many people crammed into her parents' place. It wasn't a massive group by any means, but gathering everyone into the main floor of the house made it feel like a crowd.

This party didn't have very much structure to it despite the fact that she had been planning it with Katie and Izzy for weeks, but she was nonetheless happy with how it was panning out. She was never the most structured person, after all, so going with the flow felt apt. Currently, half a dozen pizza boxes were sprawled across the dining room table and most everyone was chatting and eating to their heart's content.

Her parents weren't around to keep the commotion in check—surprisingly, they trusted that either she or Liam would stay sober enough to keep things from spiraling into total chaos and got away for the night. Leaving her and all her friends unsupervised was out of line with their usual helicopter-parent behavior, but she couldn't really blame them for not wanting to be around a bunch of drunk college kids.

A handful of them were circled up on the living room floor playing Never Have I Ever. Red solo cups – some filled with alcohol, others soda – and paper plates loaded up with pizza and snacks littered the carpet around them. There had already been one drink-spilling casualty. Katie managed to scrub it out with a Tide stick, but that they were already clumsy enough to knock stuff over before anyone was even drunk was probably a bad omen for what was to come later in the night.

Lily herself didn't feel as though she had any particularly juicy deeds to confess to, but she was certainly learning some interesting facts about her friends. Once her own cup was empty but some of the others were still going, she climbed up from her spot on the floor to retrieve more Oreos.

"Do you mind grabbing the Lay's?" Izzy asked hopefully when she saw her getting up.

"Regular or Barbecue?"

"...Both?"

Lily gave an enthusiastic thumbs up as she departed on her quest for snacks. She halted in front of the round mirror hanging in the hallway just outside the kitchen, grinning at how silly her reflection looked. Her getup was anything but understated—the white sash with "Birthday Girl" on it in pink curly lettering was slipping off her shoulder and her cheeks were flushed with a similar rosy hue. She adjusted the hem of her black dress and her askew paper party hat, which had "21" printed on it in aggressively large bubble letters that clashed so drastically with the ones on the sash that they somehow almost worked well together. Emphasis on almost. She was fully aware of how ridiculous she looked but was thriving off of it. It was a nice change to lighten up for one night and not feel obligated to take herself so seriously.

She popped into the kitchen, where her boyfriend was being a wallflower and checking something on his phone. Lily almost giggled when she considered that the two of them looked like total opposites right now, she in her gaudy outfit that would have fit in just as well at a Bachelorette party and Liam in a simple dark shirt and jeans. But it must have been true that opposites really did attract because her heart took an unexpected skip in her chest when he looked up at her and broke into a smile.

That warm, woodsy scent that to her was synonymous with him greeted her as she came over to loosely drape her arms around his shoulders and wound her fingers together behind his neck. After eighteen months around that same fragrance that forever lingered on his skin, she refused to believe that anyone else out there wore the same cologne as him. It felt so specifically his – and, in turn, hers. Stamped onto every single moment of them, from the mornings when she woke up and could still smell a trace of it on her pillow to the evenings when she came to his arms for comfort after a long day. From the first inkling of friendship all the way until now.